I’m an optimist by nature, and so Surfing Uncertainty mostly explores the positives, laying out the surprising reach and potential of the ‘predictive brain picture’ and celebrating its near-perfect interlock with work on the embodied, extended, and enactive mind. But there’s no doubt that the picture still has plenty of …
Expecting Ourselves? What does it take to be a creature that has some sense of itself as a material being, with its own concerns, encountering a structured and meaningful world? Such a being feels (from the inside, as it were) like a sensing, feeling, knowing thing, and a locus of …
Thanks to John Schwenkler for the invitation to guest-blog this week about my new book Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press NY, 2016). In the previous post, I spoke about the emerging view of the perceiving brain as a prediction machine. Brains like that are …
Thanks to John Schwenkler for the invitation to guest-blog this week about my new book Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press NY, 2016).
Call for Papers/Abstracts Workshop: Origins of Logical Reasoning York University, Toronto May 5–6, 2016 TOPIC The ability to reason logically is central to most philosophical conceptions of human thought. But are humans the only ones capable of logical reasoning? What are the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins of logical reasoning? And …
The International Conference on Thinking is now accepting submissions. Date: August 4-6, 2016 (Note: The Cognitive Science Society conference will be in Philadelphia the following week). Location: Brown University, Providence, RI, USA Submission deadline: 31st of March 2016 at 23:59 GMT This conference brings cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, decision-making researchers, and …
This final post addresses an obvious puzzle: why is reflective thinking sensory based? We can, after all, think about all sorts of abstract nonsensory topics. We think about God, the size of the universe, the mental states of other people, the validity of arguments, arithmetical facts and other mathematical entities, …
